Double Quotes: Morley Safer’s war reporting angered generals and presidents
The newsman who changed the way Americans see war has died.
1975"The Vietnam war was the first without the benefit of censorship…It was the first war on the television tube. And it brought home to me the enormous power of television. It’s scary.
By definition, news is the off-beat, the sensational, the exceptional. Reporters are trained to look for news—under that definition—on a competitive basis. So what the average person saw on TV was the bizarre, the horrible. It was not a balanced picture.” — Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, in an interview Associated Press, July 27, 1975.
1989"The most famous of these [pieces] in the early years of Vietnam was Morely Safer’s August 1965 report which showed marines burning the village of Cam Ne, setting fire to some of its thatched roofs with Zippo lighters. Safer clearly was shocked by what he saw in Cam Ne. ‘During the operation,’ he reported in his initial cable to CBS, ‘the marines were telling the people in English to get out of their underground bunkers before they burned the houses. The people therefore stayed put…until pleas from this reporter that our Vietnamese cameraman should be allowed to speak to them in the Vietnamese language.’
Safer’s story was greeted both with shock at its substance and considerable concern at the political reaction, which in fact did turn out to be substantial. Lyndon Johnson is said to have made a scatological phone call to his friend Frank Stanton, president of CBS News.” — From The Uncensored War, by Daniel C. Hamlin
